Journal of Women's History

Authors of unsigned abstracts requested anonymity.

Sandra Adickes. To Be Young Was Very Heaven: Women in New York before the First World War. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. x + 294 pp.; ill.; map. ISBN 0-312-16249-9 (cl).

Building upon the work of women’s historians, Adickes examines the lives, ideas, and struggles of first-wave feminists in New York City during the early twentieth century. The author uses biography, autobiography, literary writings, manifestos, memoirs, and papers of women activists to depict the “spirit of the times” in the period before the First World War. The book is useful as a reference for information about such feminists as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Emma Goldman, Crystal Eastman, and Mary Heaton Vorse. Friendships among women figure prominently in Adickes’s discussion of first-wave feminism. These relationships and a sense of optimism about radical change aided activists in their fight for better working conditions and pay, women’s suffrage, birth control, and personal fulfillment.———Susan Kathleen Freeman

Sister Prudence Allen, R.S.M. The Concept of Woman: The Aristotelian Revolution, 750 b.c.–a.d. 1250. 2d ed. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1997. xxiv + 583 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8028-4270-4 (pb).

This book provides a detailed analysis of the work of more than sixty philosopher/writers, from Hesiod to St. Thomas Aquinas, including Jewish and Islamic philosophers as well as several women. Focusing on the development of ideas about the nature of woman, Allen demonstrates that nearly every philosopher engaged the issue of sex identity and writers concentrated on such key questions as whether men and women are opposite, and how they differ with respect to procreation, wisdom, and virtue. She argues that three basic theories about sex identity competed: the Platonic theory of sex unity, stressing men and women’s sameness and equality; the Aristotelian theory of sex polarity, stressing sex difference and male superiority; and the theory of sex complementarity, most thoroughly developed by Hildegard of Bingen, stressing sex difference and equality. By the thirteenth century, the Aristotelian theory achieved dominance and became institutionalized in the university system.———Susan M. Hartmann

Ifi Amadiume. Reinventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion, and Culture. London: Zed Books, 1997. x + 214 pp.; no bibliography. ISBN 1-85649-533-7 (cl); 1-85649-534-5(pb).

In this two-part collection of essays written between 1989 and 1992, Amadiume, award-winning poet and political activist, challenges European studies of African societies that do not analyze matriarchy in African social structures. Six essays in part 1, “Re-Writing History,” examine methodological approaches to African history, demonstrating the links among language, thought systems, and sociopolitical structures. The author finds that Eurocentric scholars have overlooked African matriarchy, an ideological system in dialogue with patriarchy, thus resulting in biased, masculinized, and even false data. Three brief essays in part 2, “Decolonizing History,” address the transformations in contemporary women’s organizations in Africa since the colonial period and fundamental differences between Western and African women’s means of institutional and ideological empowerment. Finally, Amadiume reaffirms her loyalty to feminism, defined as women’s political consciousness which includes self-awareness, self-esteem, solidarity, and the challenging of gender inequalities.———Tiwanna M. Simpson

Joyce Antler. The Journey Home: How Jewish Women Shaped Modern America. New York: Schocken Books, 1997. xviii + 410 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8052-1101-2 (pb).

Antler’s survey of Jewish women in modern U.S. history examines how a wide variety of women contributed to the development of American society and culture. She argues that Jewish women often felt conflicted and sought ways to reconcile their multiple loyalties “as Jews, women and Americans.” Rather than focus on a small set of Jewish women, Antler ably presents a full and diverse range of protagonists: from the anarchist Emma Goldman to the Zionist Henrietta Szold; from such entertainers as Sophie Tucker and Fannie Brice to such trailblazers as the first ordained American woman rabbi, Sally Priesand. She investigates the myriad ways Jews negotiated ethnic, religious, class, and gender identities from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century.———Mary McCune

Rima D. Apple and Janet Golden, eds. Mothers & Motherhood: Readings in American History. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997. xvii + 605 pp. ISBN 0-8142-0738-3 (cl); 0-8142-0739-1 (pb).

The advent of women’s history has given historians opportunities to explore motherhood and its historical significance and evolution. Apple and Golden, along with the contributors to this collection, place motherhood in cultural, social, political, intellectual, and economic contexts and thereby expand the study of motherhood to include women who are not just white, middle-class, and urban. The diverse essays in this volume explore how ethnic assimilation, breast-feeding, “republican motherhood,” racism, midwifery, twilight sleep, alternative birth, slavery, voluntary motherhood, industrialization, and wage earning have affected and altered the institution of motherhood.———Andrea L. Cipriani

Judith R. Baskin, ed. Jewish Women in Historical Perspective. 2d ed. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1998. 384 pp. ISBN 0-8143-2713-3 (pb).

The fifteen essays in this revised and expanded edition apply gender as a category of analysis to examine a broad range of topics in Jewish women’s history, from portrayals of women in the Hebrew Bible to Jewish women’s religious lives in the United States. In the introduction, Baskin argues that previous accounts of Jewish history have emphasized public, religious, and intellectual realms within Jewish communities where men have played the dominant role. Focusing on gender, this volume expands the traditional boundaries of male-centered historiography to include the voices and experiences of Jewish women in educational, social, religious, and economic spheres of life. Methodologically, these essays consider the evolving and nonstatic nature of Judaism and Jewish populations, and the diverse makeup of these communities throughout the Diaspora. Finally, this collection examines the interplay between Jews and non-Jews, and the impact of this relationship on the lives of Jewish women.———Kate Heilman

Mary Warner Blanchard. Oscar Wilde’s America: Counterculture in the Gilded Age. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998. xv + 302 pp.; ill.; no bibliography. ISBN 0-300-07460-3 (cl).

In 1882, Oscar Wilde took a publicized and much discussed tour of the United States which took him to big cities and such far flung places as Leadville, Colorado. Blanchard uses Wilde’s tour, and the reaction to it, as a touchstone for an examination of what she calls the “aesthetics movement” in America. To explore this movement, which, according to Blanchard, flourished between the Civil War and the 1890s, she looks at the careers of Candace Wheeler, Celia Thaxter, Mary Louise McLaughlin, and Mariana Van Rensselaer (hoping in her words to “rescue” these women from historical “oblivion”). She also examines the phenomena of interior decoration, artistic dress, and aesthetic icons. Ultimately, the aesthetics movement, which emphasized the feminine and the domestic, met with a “repressive reaction” symbolized by the return to martial machismo by 1898. In the end, the aesthete was replaced in American life by those who would lead strenuous lives.———Steven Conn

Mark Blasius and Shane Phelan, eds. We Are Everywhere: A Historical Sourcebook of Gay and Lesbian Politics. New York: Routledge, 1997. xii + 844 pp.; no index. ISBN 0-415-90858-2 (cl); 0-415-90859-0 (pb).

We Are Everywhere presents questions, theories, and debates regarding the politics of same-sex desire and love. Organized chronologically into seven sections, the book begins with a “pre-history” of gay and lesbian politics, focused primarily on male homosexuality in Europe during the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. The second section deals with the turn of the century through World War II, assessing homosexual politics and culture in Germany, Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States and drawing primarily from contemporary books, petitions, laws, trial testimonies, and police reports. The bulk of the volume, six hundred pages to be precise, concentrates on gay and lesbian politics since 1950: the homophile movement, gay liberation and lesbian feminism, the politics of AIDS, and questions for the present and future. Essays, letters, and manifestos from the United States dominate the last four sections of the book, although European and Third World perspectives are occasionally included. Emphasis on the intersection of identity and politics is threaded throughout the selections, and the editors’ introductions provide theory and context for interpreting an impressive collection of texts.———Susan Kathleen Freeman

Catherine La Courreye Blecki and Karin A. Wulf, eds. Milcah Martha Moore’s Book: A Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997. xxiv + 341 pp.; ill.; genealogy chart. ISBN 0-271-01690-6 (cl); 0-271-01691-4 (pb).

Milcah Martha Moore’s commonplace book was typical for a young woman of her community, class, and time. These unpublished manuscript books of transcribed poetry and prose were meant to be circulated among friends and family and were tied to the Quaker tradition of private circulating libraries of appropriate literature that was both secular and spiritual but always morally instructional. As a Quaker woman who came of age during the crisis preceding the American Revolution and who lived through the first few decades of nationhood in Philadelphia, the cultural and intellectual capital of the country, Moore provides us with an unusual view of women’s intellectual lives in this place and time. This particular volume also rediscovers some previously missing portions of Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson’s journal, as well as poems by Susanna Wright and Hannah Griffitts. Most important, it reminds us that women’s circles found intellectual affinity as important a social bond as did men in Philadelphia.———Gretchen A. Adams

Catherine A. Brekus. Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. x + 466 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8078-2441-0 (cl); 0-8078-4745-3 (pb).

Maximizing the use of sometimes scant archival resources, Brekus documents the public religious activities of over one hundred American evangelical women from the mid-eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth century. She focuses on women in lower-class revivalistic and premillennial groups who acted as exhorters, lecturers, and preachers at camp and church meetings. Brekus argues that disestablished evangelical churches provided an “informal public space” in which black and white women’s religious leadership did not pose a challenge to white men’s control of the formal public spaces of established religion, politics, and economics. As small sects evolved into established denominations, women’s preaching was discouraged as socially destabilizing. Brekus’s subjects were socially and theologically conservative; they emphasized women’s subservience to men and both benefited and were hurt by the imagery of the cult of true womanhood. The author documents how the women and their supporters sought to reconcile their preaching with biblical prohibitions against such activity.———Valerie S. Rake

Sebastian P. Brock and Susan Ashbrook Harvey, eds. Holy Women of the Syrian Orient. 1987; reprint, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998. xix + 197 pp.; map. ISBN 0-520-21366-1 (pb).

This book is a collection of fifteen Syriac texts in translation dating from the fourth to the seventh centuries a.d., each about the life or death of a holy Christian woman. Varying in degrees of historicity from eyewitness accounts to near fables, these texts, each with a brief explanation and many explanatory notes, make available to the public important sources on women from an underresearched area: Christianity in Syria. Even so, the documents, with one possible exception, were written by men, and therefore a true understanding of how these holy women’s lives affected other women is difficult to gauge. Nevertheless, the texts do suggest a great deal about early Medieval hagiography and offer some insight into the social restrictions placed on women as well as the social and religious opportunities afforded them.———Joshua J. Perkey

Dorothy M. Brown and Elizabeth McKeown. The Poor Belong to Us: Catholic Charities and American Welfare. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. viii + 284 pp. ISBN 0-674-68973-9 (cl).

Brown and McKeown discuss the role of Catholic reformers and charitable organizations in the development of the U.S. welfare system from the Civil War to World War II. The authors argue that through charity Catholics gained access to and helped shape national policy and public social welfare spending. With the rise of “scientific charity” at the turn of the century, Catholic organizations consolidated by creating administrative bureaucracies controlled by the dioceses, causing tensions between priests, religious laymen, and the newly professionalized social workers who were mostly women. Focusing primarily on New York City, the authors examine Catholic charities as significant political players in shaping the New Deal, ensuring that their agencies became administrators of state and federal welfare funds. Although initially reluctant to allow state and federal intrusion into the lives of the poor, professional Catholic social workers also recognized the need to prioritize material security over clients’ religious rights. This book is an important addition to recent scholarship on the American welfare system and the varied contributions of women to the evolving welfare state.———Kate Clifford Larson

Barbara Caine. English Feminism, 1780–1980. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. xvii + 336 pp. ISBN 0-19-820686-0 (cl); 0-19-820434-5 (pb).

This overview of British feminist thought extends from the early writings of Mary Wollstonecraft to the 1970s when leftist writers attempted to fit women’s liberation movements into the broader context of European socialism. Caine begins with an extensive discussion of Wollstonecraft, whose writings, while contradictory, form the basis of English feminism. The works of Harriet Martineau and Anna Wheeler are contrasted, along with those of John Stuart Mill and evangelical writers, demonstrating the early split between feminists who emphasized pragmatism and those who believed in rebellion against middle-class values. Caine stresses that this division became more complicated as feminists became more socially diverse and ambitious to change the oppressive society around them. Such victories as the Franchise Act of 1928 also helped redefine the goals and composition of the feminist movement. As equality has come to mean more than just political citizenship, instead of one feminism, women in England have over time espoused many feminisms.———Paul Hibbeln

Michael D. Calabria. Florence Nightingale in Egypt and Greece: Her Diary and “Visions.” Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. 167 pp. ISBN 0-7914-3116-9 (pb).

Before Florence Nightingale’s unprecedented accomplishments as a nurse in the Crimean War, for years she struggled to find meaning and purpose in her life. Some of these struggles are evidenced in the diary, letters, and literary works she produced on a trip to Egypt and Greece in winter 1849, collected and analyzed in this volume by Calabria. Focusing on the spiritual aspects of the intense psychological anguish Nightingale experienced during this trip, the author argues that her problems arose less from the restrictions placed on upper-class women in the mid-nineteenth century than from the difficulties Nightingale encountered as a person who felt called to service by God, yet remained unsure of how to follow this calling.———Birgitte Søland

Pat Califia. Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism. San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1997. 309 pp. ISBN 1-57344-072-8 (pb).

Using transgender autobiographies, scholarly works, and her own perspective, Califia gives an account of the politics surrounding transgenderism in the West during the twentieth century. Beginning with an overview of a few autobiographies from the first half of the century, the author continues with an investigation of the politics of gender science; an examination of transphobia among feminist and gay academics; a discussion of contemporary transsexual autobiography; an insightful look into the lives of the partners of transgendered people; and an account of activism associated with transgenderism.———Amber Blubaugh

Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe. The Shirley Letters: From the California Mines, 1851–1852. Ed. Marlene Smith-Baranzini. Berkeley, Calif.: Heyday Books, 1998. xxxvii + 195 pp.; map; ill. ISBN 0-890771-01-5 (pb).

Louise Clappe was one of the many women who accompanied her husband to the gold fields of California, but one of the few who left a detailed account of her experiences. Her physician husband provided her with both a cook and housekeeper leaving Louise, with no children, time to contemplate her surroundings. Her literary talents resulted in “The Shirley Letters,” a series of letters published in 1854 as part of California’s first literary magazine. Clappe’s letters reveal a slow transformation from delighted absorption in her physical surroundings to a horror with the increasing lawlessness of the miners. But, forced to leave when the area mines proved to be unproductive, Clappe left the gold fields with regret. Her letters reveal the strength of will and character of women who were the early pioneers of California.———Marcia Schmidt Blaine

Stuart Clark. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. xvii + 827 pp. ISBN 0-19-820001-3 (cl).

Clark explores the place and function of witchcraft theory and demonology in early modern European intellectual history. The book’s first section—language—begins by examining both the logic and rhetoric witchcraft authors employed. The following sections analyze texts on witchcraft from particular perspectives—science, history, religion, and politics. Rather than treating witchcraft theory and belief as an aberrant philosophy, Clark finds that such beliefs complemented and fitted rationally within many other views in Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. However, the author is quick to note that witchcraft ideology, like other theories, was embraced by some and rejected by others. Witchcraft was thus a controversial matter and a relative, not an absolute, concept. Clark treats witchcraft theory and demonology as a composite subject precisely because those who wrote about witchcraft were not interested in it to the exclusion of everything else. In doing so, Clark firmly places theories about witchcraft in the context of early modern European intellectual life.———Jerry B. Pierce

Patricia Hill Collins. Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. xxiii + 312 pp.; glossary. ISBN 0-8166-2376-7 (cl); 0-8166-2377-5 (pb).

Expanding on her first work, Black Feminist Thought, Collins explores the relationship between language and the formation of social theory. This interdisciplinary and epistemological study examines the ways social theories regarding race, gender, ethnicity, and class are constructed and legitimated by hierarchical power relations. Collins argues that oppressed groups, such as the black women she analyzes, have a different frame of reference from which to combat economic and social injustice. Because what is perceived as normative, universal, and ideal has developed from hegemonic exclusionary practices by the elite, African-American women and other oppressed groups produce alternative theories of language, difference, and justice. Through an examination of black feminist thought as well as from her own experiences as a black female, the author provides insight into the way oppressed groups create critical or “oppositional” social theories that are central to their political empowerment and their “search for justice.”———Shannon L. Frystak

Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch. African Women: A Modern History. Trans. Beth Gillian Raps. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997. xviii + 308 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-81332-360-6 (cl); 0-8133-2361-4 (pb).

This is a stimulating text that presents an overview of the stages and forms of collective roles that women played in sub-Saharan Africa from the colonial period to the present. The aim of the work is to comprehend the differences between male and female roles and to explore individual emancipation through various means including political strength and creativity. This scholarly analysis also sheds light on the impact of trade, migration, urbanization, slavery, and colonialism on African women’s lives. The author takes into account the cultural diversity in women’s lives across regions and the variations between urban and rural contexts. Coquery-Vidrovitch argues that African women, despite their lack of education and relatively low status, are Africa’s best hope for the future. This study relies upon an extensive array of sources including private documents, public records, and oral sources.———Steeve O. Buckridge

Tove Stang Dahl. The Muslim Family: A Study of Women’s Rights in Islam. Trans. Ronald Walford. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1997. vi + 211 pp.; no index. ISBN 82-00-22420-1 (cl).

The Muslim Family is part of a broader research project that investigates the possibilities for sustainable development in large Third World cities. Together with anthropologist Unni Wikan, Dahl—a lawyer and women’s rights advocate—examines how Cairo’s urban poor carry out Islamic practices and ideals. Based on frequent contact with thirty-three families over a period of twenty-five years, the study describes the intersection of religious rules, laws of state, and daily life in a traditional Muslim society. The author concludes that while the complementary form of family prescribed by Islam has enabled women to sustain family development and neighborhood networks, it has also kept them subordinate. In a rapidly changing world, the survival of the nuclear family will depend on a more equitable division of labor and decision making power between men and women.———Charlotte Weber

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. The Divine Narcissus/El divino narciso. Trans. and annotated by Patricia A. Peters and Renée Domeier. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998. xxxiv + 202 pp.; appendix. ISBN 0-8263-1930-0 (cl); 0-8263-1888-6 (pb).

This is the first English translation of the complete work of The Divine Narcissus. The play is an auto sacramental, a one-act drama that honored the Holy Eucharist and provided theological instruction. Allegorical in content, autos incorporated poetry, instrumental and choral music, dance, and special effects. Sor Juana wrote the auto around 1688 to explain Christian concepts to the Aztecs as well as to demonstrate Aztec experiences under colonization. Peters and Domeier include an appendix, notes, and an informative introduction which highlights Sor Juana’s artistic and intellectual contributions, explains the medieval genre of auto sacramental, and provides an analysis of The Divine Narcissus as an American feminist art.———Anna M. Travis

Sheila Delany. Impolitic Bodies: Poetry, Saints, and Society in Fifteenth-Century England, the Work of Osbern Bokenham. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. xi + 236 pp., ill. ISBN 0-19-510988-0 (cl); 0-19-510989-9 (pb).

Delany explores the writings of Osbern Bokenham, a fifteenth-century Augustinian friar, poet, and ardent Yorkist. Bokenham’s legendary, the first book of saints’ lives composed in English, depicted the lives of thirteen female saints in poetic form. In this study, Delany divides Bokenham’s work into three “bodies”: the corpus of theological and poetic texts which inspired him; the representations of the female body in Bokenham’s poetry and in fifteenth-century hagiography; and the “body politic” of English society at a critical point in its history. The intersection of these three bodies constitutes the theme of Delany’s analysis. The first section considers the influence of St. Augustine and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales on Bokenham’s work while the second explores Bokenham’s distinctive treatment of the female form and corporeal semiotic of his legendary. In the last section, Delany analyzes Bokenham’s poetry with regard to the role of women in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English politics, set in the context of the struggles between the Yorkists and Lancastrians, with their succession crises, treacherous politics, and devastating war.———Lorraine Netrick Abraham

Frank Dikötter. Imperfect Conceptions: Medical Knowledge, Birth Defects, and Eugenics in China. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. ix + 226 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-231-11370-6 (cl).

This cultural study of medicine explains the ways in which “imperfect” births are restricted in contemporary China, where the 1995 nationwide eugenics law has endorsed sterilization and abortion. Dikötter examines a wide range of primary sources on birth defects in the late imperial (c. 1550–1911), republican (1911–1949), and communist (1949-present) eras and finds a striking continuity. Eugenics in China was not simply a foreign scientific theory; rather, it was a “biologized” reconfiguration of traditional beliefs concerning reproduction and heredity. In particular, the author discusses such factors as the patrilineal family system and the holistic medical approach, in which the individual body and environment are closely linked. Dikötter also recognizes common characteristics of eugenics, which shaped ideologies of race, nation, and sex, in almost every modernizing society around the world in the twentieth century. This book offers a well-balanced view of the peculiar cultural and historical factors and universal forces of modernity.———Sumiko Otsubo

Nicole Ann Dombrowski, ed. Women and War in the Twentieth Century: Enlisted with or without Consent. New York: Garland, 1999. ix + 377 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8153-2287-9 (cl).

This edited volume contains fifteen essays focusing on women and war in no less than eleven different countries, including France, Britain, Germany, China, Japan, the United States, the Soviet Union, Syria, Lebanon, Guatemala, and Peru. While the essays vary in quality, collectively they address a wide range of problems faced by women during wartime and the issues resulting from the greater participation of women in war, including public and private sexual morality, rape, maternity, the place of lesbians in the military, and the experiences of women refugees. Authors pay particular attention to the roles women played as agents as well as victims of war. The expansive nature of this volume makes it important for military and women’s historians in need of comparative perspective.———Sean Martin

R. M. Douglas. Feminist Freikorps: The British Voluntary Women Police, 1914–1940. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1999. xv + 171 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-275-96249-0 (cl).

This history of the voluntary women police movement in Britain is a case study of a women’s group that simultaneously embraced feminism and fascism. Specifically, Douglas draws heavily on public and private documents to analyze the goals, struggles, and leadership of an organization known first and briefly as the Women Police Volunteers (WPV), then as the Women’s Police Service (WPS), and finally as the Women’s Auxiliary Service (WAS). Formed in 1914 by veterans of the militant suffrage campaign, the organization initially had two goals: to break men’s monopoly over law enforcement and to regulate public morality by enforcing an idealized and asexual code of conduct on women. The government occasionally used voluntary women police on a contractual basis, but it never gave them official status. Frustrated by the government’s—and the public’s—lack of enthusiasm for their outmoded sexual values, paramilitary uniforms, and authoritarian style, WAS members took up fascist causes in the 1920s and 1930s. Douglas offers an intriguing interpretation of the links between early-twentieth-century militant feminism and ultraconservative politics.———Janis Appier

Virginia G. Drachman. Sisters in Law: Women Lawyers in Modern American History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. xiv + 334 pp.; tables; no bibliography. ISBN 0-674-80991-2 (cl).

Combining quantitative analysis with qualitative narrative, Drachman reveals how a growing number of women desegregated American legal institutions between the 1860s and 1920s. Their efforts, which met with only modest success, consequently spurred change in the law. Due to the conservative nature of the male-dominated legal profession, women made up only 1 percent of all lawyers in 1920. The few who did attain a law degree, Drachman recounts, constantly had to decide whether to be lawyers or women first. The difference in emphasis determined whether individual lawyers married, practiced in an all-male courtroom or in a law office, wore traditional or modern clothing, and/or used their position to fight for women’s suffrage and new opportunities for women in other professions. In the struggle to define themselves, Drachman concludes, they formed a unique community of “sisters in law” to whom female attorneys today owe both respect and gratitude.———Rowland Brucken

Georges Duby. Remembering the Dead, vol. 2 of Women of the Twelfth Century. Trans. Jean Birrell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. vi + 153 pp.; no index; no bibliography. ISBN 0-226-16784-4 (pb).

In the first part of this volume, Duby investigates the medieval understanding of women’s place in society through their relationship with the dead and claims that women had a special relationship with the dead ancestors of their families. In parts 2 and 3, Duby examines the portrayal of women in the histories of two noble houses: the Dukes of Normandy and the Counts of Guînes. He demonstrates the importance these histories placed on female ancestors. They considered marriage the central institution of noble houses, with wives exercising power in their husbands’ names. Concubines were praised for their willingness to please a noble ancestor and thus guarantee the continuation of the lineage. Noble widows, finally, were remembered as devout or even saintly.———Leigh Ann Craig

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie. London: Verso, 1997. viii + 224 pp. ISBN 1-85984-856-7 (cl).

Red Dirt is a cathartic family and personal history, an effort by Dunbar-Ortiz to come to terms with her own past and explore the process by which she was radicalized. The book is also a social history of a whole people of a particular part of the United States; it is a window into the lives of the white rural poor, known as “Okies,” in the twentieth century. Dunbar-Ortiz begins her account with a profile of her paternal grandfather, Emmett Victor Dunbar, an original member of the Socialist Party and an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World. This anchors the account in an agrarian radicalism. “Roxie” was born in 1938 to a freethinking authoritarian father and intensely religious mother in rural Oklahoma. Red Dirt chronicles her growing up and ends with Dunbar-Ortiz’s troubled first marriage. Along the way, the autobiography addresses Scots-Irish (as well as American Indian and African-American) ethnicity, “white trash” and rural working-class status, and the complicated way these come together in an “Okie” identity.———Chad Montrie

Frances H. Early. A World without War: How U.S. Feminists and Pacifists Resisted World War I. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1997. xx + 265 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8156-2745-9 (cl); 0-8156-2764-5 (pb).

Early, a historian of peace activism, explicates the connections among antiwar activism, feminism, and civil liberties. To this end, she highlights the lives of Tracy Mygatt and Frances Witherspoon, two activists associated with the New York Bureau of Legal Advice. This organization, a precursor to the American Civil Liberties Union, provided legal aid to groups associated with the antiwar and feminist movements of the World War I era. At bottom, the bureau both reflected and fostered a political environment wherein women and men could merge their liberal and radical political sympathies. Moreover, the activists perceived their organized practices as simultaneously personal and political. Early’s text analyzes women’s political activism beyond Progressive Era politics, demonstrating how suffrage activists and socialist revolutionaries worked together on civil liberties and antiwar issues.———Stephanie Gilmore

Elizabeth Ellet. Revolutionary Women in the War for American Independence: A One-Volume Revised Edition of Elizabeth Ellet’s 1848 Landmark Series. Ed. Lincoln Diamant. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998. x + 226 pp.; no bibliography. ISBN 0-275-96263-6 (cl).

Elizabeth Ellet’s three volumes of short biographical sketches of women of the American Revolutionary generation forms the basis for this work. Diamant has reorganized, edited, annotated, and augmented Ellet’s original volumes resulting in a useful organization by state and region and explanatory notes for the nonspecialist. This edition has some less successful results as well. For example, the final chapter, oddly entitled “Sleeping with the Enemy,” includes not only wives of Loyalists but also women who were Loyalists in their own right. First published in the year of the Seneca Falls convention, Ellet’s biographies are interesting for recovering some remarkable and colorful individual histories and for their window on nineteenth-century women historians and their view of Revolutionary era women’s accomplishments.———Gretchen A. Adams

R. Amy Elman. Sexual Subordination and State Intervention: Comparing Sweden and the United States. Providence, R.I.: Berghahn Books, 1996. vii + 146 pp. ISBN 1-57181-071-4 (cl); 1-157181-072-2 (pb).

Elman’s cross-national case study of Sweden and the United States examines both policy and state structure to study the effectiveness of policies linked to sexual violence and harassment. Unlike previous accounts of the success of Sweden’s public policies relating to women which often focus on class and social variables, Elman’s analysis reveals a surprising conclusion about policy innovation and responsiveness. She concludes that the relatively decentralized nature of the U.S. federal state system allows for greater access, swifter responses, and more innovation than the relatively closed, centralized, corporatist Swedish state. By examining sexual subordination in country-specific contexts, Elman highlights structural differences between states and the degree to which these states’ interventions benefit women.———Allyson M. Lowe

Barbara Alpern Engel and Anastasia Posadskaya-Vanderbeck, eds. A Revolution of Their Own: Voices of Women in Soviet History. Trans. Sona Hoisington. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998. x + 236 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8133-3365-2 (cl); 0-8133-3366-0 (pb).

Based on interviews with eight Russian women of various backgrounds—including political activists, peasants, daughters of priests and nobles, and urban workers, all born prior to 1917—this book explores how significant events and changes in Russia in the first half of the twentieth century affected women’s lives. The introduction illuminates how women experienced such transformations as the Bolshevik revolution, civil war, National Economic Policy under Lenin, industrialization and the first Five-Year Plan, liquidation of kulaks, purges, collectivization, and World War II and its aftermath. The interviewees openly discuss their personal and work lives. In concluding remarks, Engel and Posadskaya-Vanderbeck examine the manner in which these women analyze gender equality and the achievements of the Soviet period. Each woman’s oral history is presented in a separate chapter, which begins with a brief introduction followed by the interview. Finally, the authors include a chapter on their methodolgy and the important meaning of silences in oral histories.———Basia A. Nowak

Christie Ann Farnham, ed. Women of the American South: A Multicultural Reader. New York: New York University Press, 1997. x + 319 pp. ISBN 0-8147-2654-2 (cl); 0-8147-26550 (pb).

Although the seventeen essays in this collection share a focus on southern women, their wide-ranging span of topics illustrates the true diversity of that category. The southern women covered in this book include Cherokee, Jewish, and Appalachian women, and their activities that are chronicled range from memorializing confederate war dead to spreading the words of Marcus Garvey. All but one of the articles is previously unpublished, and they are chronologically arranged from prehistory to the 1970s. An editor’s note begins each chapter by filling in the historical context of the topic at hand.———Pippa Holloway

Joan M. Ferrante. To the Glory of Her Sex: Women’s Roles in the Composition of Medieval Texts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. xii + 295 pp. ISBN 0-253-33254-0 (cl); 0-253-21108-5 (pb).

Ferrante examines women’s roles in politics, religion, and intellectual pursuits from antiquity to the fourteenth century. She has assembled a vast array of documentary evidence of women’s activities which she utilizes to illuminate women’s involvement in the development of European arts and letters, economics, religion, and culture. The book is divided into three sections with the first examining women’s epistolary writings and the second exploring their contributions to the writings of history, religion, and courtly literature. In the third part, Ferrante analyzes the written output of women in all genres to reveal how they envisioned and represented themselves in literature. Ferrante’s intention is to show that women were at the center of public life, acting on their own behalves or as agents of husbands, sons, brothers, and fathers, and that even when acting as agents in male roles, they were aware of themselves as women. She contends that their contributions to the shaping of European society throughout the ages have been so frequent and consistent that historiography must include the role of women to be considered true history.———Lorraine Netrick Abraham

Suzanne Pullon Fitch and Roseann M. Mandziuk. Sojourner Truth as Orator: Wit, Story, and Song. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. xix + 238 pp. ISBN 0-313-30068-2 (cl).

Part of a series on great American orators, this book provides an important anthology of Sojourner Truth’s speeches, songs, reports, and letters. By examining the rhetorical strategies used by Truth, the authors critically assess Truth’s ability to persuade her intended audiences in defending the abolition of slavery, women’s rights, civil rights, self-determination, and temperance. Part 1 provides a critical and contextual overview of the multiple layers of Truth’s life and discourse. Truth’s journey from slavery to freedom, her use of humor and song in speeches, and her identity as folk legend are all examined. In part 2, the authors present a chronology of Truth’s speeches, her songs, third person reports, and the few letters Truth composed.———Kate Clifford Larson

Jack Fruchtman, ed. An Eye-Witness Account of the French Revolution by Helen Maria Williams: Letters Containing a Sketch of the Politics of France. New York: Peter Lang, 1997. 260 pp. ISBN 0-8204-3120-6 (cl).

In a series of letters written between May 1793 and July 1794, the British-born poet and novelist Helen Maria Williams recounted her experiences in France during the Terror. Combining journalistic reporting, political commentary, and personal reflections, Williams recorded the degeneration of the Revolution into chaos, corruption, and murder. In this process, many of the leading literary and political figures with whom she associated, including Madame Roland and George-Jacques Danton, were executed, and Williams was temporarily imprisoned. Nonetheless, she remained committed to the principles of the Revolution, and her letters expressed an enduring faith that liberty and justice would eventually be expanded to all people. Fruchtman’s introduction provides readers with a brief account of Williams’s unconventional life, a glimpse into the world of women writers in the 1790s, and a short history of the French Revolution.———Birgitte Søland

Alma M. García, ed. Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings. New York: Routledge, 1997. xix + 324 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-415-91800-6 (cl); 0-415-91800-4 (pb).

This collection brings together for the first time the writings of Chicana feminists active in the Chicano movement from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s. The materials in Chicana Feminist Thought establish major themes in the history of Chicana women; reveal little-known or previously ignored documents; and acquaint the reader with such influential women leaders in the movement as Marta Cotera, Francisca Flores, Elizabeth Martínez, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, and Anna Nieto-Gomez (to name just a few) through their writings. This collection will serve as an invaluable reader for anyone interested in issues of race, ethnicity, women, feminism, communities, radical movements, and sexual and identity politics in recent U.S. history.———Heather Lee Miller

Christine Gledhill and Gillian Swanson, eds. Nationalising Femininity: Culture, Sexuality, and British Cinema in the Second World War. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1996. 307 pp. ISBN 0-7190-4259-3 (cl).

This collection of seventeen essays, written by film and media scholars, cultural studies specialists, and women’s historians, sheds new light on the question of how the Second World War influenced British women’s lives. As the four opening essays point out, a variety of social policies sought to bolster a sense of national unity and sexual stability in the face of upheavals the war caused. These efforts coexisted with a range of social practices and cultural representations, which are the focus of the remaining thirteen essays. Through analyses of topics as diverse as newsreel coverage of the British royal family, changes in feminine fashions, the contents of women’s magazines, and wartime cinema, these essays demonstrate the ways in which notions of femininity, womanhood, and sexual difference were simultaneously challenged and reinforced in the course of the war.———Birgitte Søland

June E. Hahner, ed. Women through Women’s Eyes: Latin American Women in Nineteenth-Century Travel Accounts. Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1998. xxvi + 184 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8420-2633-9 (cl); 0-8420-2634-7 (pb).

Women through Women’s Eyes is a collection of ten firsthand accounts by female travelers to Latin America in the nineteenth century. Organized chronologically, these travel narratives present foreigners’ perspectives on the diversity of Latin American women and their experiences ranging from nuns to slaves and heroines of independence movements. The travelers address women’s labor, religion, gender relations, family life, and education, and offer insight into the nature of cross-cultural relations between Latin Americans and visitors from Northern European and the United States. Providing a window into how Anglo-American women represented themselves in contrast to women in Latin America, these selections broaden our understanding of differences among women in the nineteenth century.———Anna M. Travis

Marybeth Hamilton. “When I’m Bad, I’m Better: Mae West, Sex, and American Entertainment. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. x + 307 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-520-21094-8 (pb).

Challenging the conventional idea that Mae West is irrelevant and of little interest to contemporary society, Hamilton’s book is an investigation of West’s actual—as opposed to her self-invented—biography. This feminist work places West within the context of cultural history, and her place there is reflective of the control she maintained over her work, its “disreputable performance traditions” (254), and the response of audiences over a number of decades. Unlike many subjects of serious film biographies, West was never victimized, either in her or her audience’s eyes. Her endlessly clever career and image control is more prescient of pop-culture icon Madonna than reflective of Hollywood’s well-known victims, and both her camp persona and her carefully cultivated autobiography kept many biographical facts from public knowledge. Hamilton discloses those facts and traces West’s rise as performer and mocker of sexual mores, always stressing the idea that “unraveling the threads that wove West’s persona” involves keeping her solidly in the context of the social history of her time (2).———Jim Lovensheimer

Sarah Hamilton. The Two-Headed Household: Gender and Rural Development in the Ecuadorean Andes. Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998. x + 296 pp.; ill.; appendixes; tables. ISBN 0-8229-4072-8 (cl); 0-8229-5677-2 (pb).

In this study of rural development and the people of Chanchaló, an indigenous farming community in the Ecuadorean Andes, Hamilton examines the dynamics between planned agricultural developmental initiatives and gender relations. The author’s findings reveal that despite unequal access to macroeconomic institutions and hegemonic cultural change, indigenous women’s economic and social status has not eroded in Chanchaló or within the home. By exploring household decision making processes and observing daily interactions between women and men, Hamilton illustrates that each household has two heads. She argues that gender relations in this community are conceptualized from both ideological and material bases which represent a radical departure from those in Ecuador’s urban sectors. The author aptly explains how gender egalitarianism has survived within a community surrounded by institutional patriarchy.———Anna M. Travis

Dianne Walta Hart. Undocumented in L.A.: An Immigrant Story. Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1997. 136 pp. ISBN 0-8420-2648-7 (cl); 0-8420-2649-5 (pb).

This piece of oral history records the struggles of Yamileh López, a Nicaraguan Sandanista woman, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, who, pressured by poverty, made her way to Los Angeles as an illegal immigrant. López’s testimony also provides a backdrop to the 1992 riots in Los Angeles. The cultural values and socioeconomic factors shaping her personal experience, confronted with the values of the white U.S. culture represented by the author, culminate in a provocative rendition of the realities of Latino immigrants’ lives.———Alcira Dueñas

Beryl Haslam. From Suffrage to Internationalism: The Political Evolution of Three British Feminists, 1908–1939. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. xxvi + 250 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8204-2566-4 (cl).

This political biography of Kathleen Courtney, Catherine Marshall, and Helena Swanwick traces their evolution from suffrage activism in the mainstream National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies to work for peace and justice in the Women’s International League, the British branch of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Haslam is less interested in the three women’s personal lives than in their ideas and political commitments, although she devotes some attention to explaining how they developed their feminist or humanist consciousness. She places their stories in the context of the larger mixed-gender liberal internationalist movement rather than feminist pacifism.———Leila J. Rupp

Wanda A. Hendricks. Gender, Race, and Politics in the Midwest: Black Club Women in Illinois. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. xviii + 162 pp.; no bibliography. ISBN 0-253-33447-0 (cl); 0-253-21233-2 (pb).

From 1890 to 1920, African-American club women in Illinois helped to establish the nation’s largest network of black women’s clubs. Hendricks explores how black women utilized these organizations to become social and political agents of reform and community uplift by meeting Progressive Era challenges. Combating homelessness, unemployment, illiteracy, and poor health care through their volunteerism and fund-raising efforts, these women confronted many of the ills that existed among African Americans. By developing suffrage clubs and voicing their opinions on major issues, black women were also a great political force in Illinois. Indeed, their efforts resulted in the election of the first black alderman in Chicago. In Hendricks’s final analysis, the political and social organization of black women in Illinois demonstrated a commitment to the black community and a perpetual goal to further the cause of racial equality.———Cherisse R. Jones

Kathleen Herbert. Peace-Weavers and Shield-Maidens: Women in Early English Society. Hockwold-cum-Wilton, England: Anglo-Saxon Books, 1997. 59 pp. ISBN 1-898281-11-4 (pb).

Herbert, a scholar of early English culture and a historical novelist, argues that modern readers ignore the early history of English women when they assume that written English history begins with the Battle of Hastings. Herbert contends that by scrutinizing the position of women not only historically, but also in literature and even jokes, one can fully assess women’s position in a society. In this slim volume, Herbert analyzes the position of women in early English history and society through an examination of the well-known accounts of Tacitus, Bede, and Procopius as well as such documents as the Exeter Chronicles and Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. The title refers to the two archetypes of women in early English culture: woman as an instrument of diplomacy and peace, as a mediator between her own people and those of her husband; and woman as an instrument of war, equal in strength and power to English men in battle. Herbert finds that women were portrayed as strong and purposeful, yet frivolous and possessed of strong senses of humor.———Lorraine Netrick Abraham

John Hoerr. We Can’t Eat Prestige: The Women Who Organized Harvard. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997. xiv + 280 pp. ISBN 1-56639-535-6 (cl).

Hoerr traces the organizing efforts of women (and a few men) from their first attempt to gain union recognition in the mid-1970s to their third and successful campaign, as the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers, in 1988. He contends that the women’s movement provided the initial inspiration for organizing and the labor movement also made valuable contributions, but neither movement provided all of what the women needed and sometimes they even hindered their progress. Ultimately, the workers were forced to depend largely on themselves; they forged their own network of dedicated activists and developed organizing methods more appropriate for their workplace. More generally, this book examines the development of “a feminine model of trade unionism” among the Harvard staff. According to Hoerr, this model is conflict-averse, emphasizing community building rather than generating anger, and based on a one-on-one organizing approach.———Chad Montrie

Kristin L. Hoganson. Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998. xii + 305 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-300-07181-7 (cl).

In this investigation of the cultural roots of the Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars, Hoganson uses gender to reconfigure the traditional security issue of war. She demonstrates that gendered ideas about citizenship and power affect the formulation of foreign policy. Jingoes, disturbed by the passing of the Civil War generation and women’s incursions into politics, feared that a decline in manly character would threaten their ability to maintain their class, racial, and national privileges. They forced war with Spain to reinforce the association between martial capacity and political authority. To stave off future degeneracy, male policy makers and pundits then waged war against the Filipinos. In the final chapter, Hoganson describes how opponents of imperialism used the imagery of pathology to discourage further expansion. Anti-imperialists, including activist women, argued that brutal warfare in the decadent tropics debased the nation’s manly honor. Partly as a result of these efforts, imperialism gradually waned in the early twentieth century.———Jennifer Walton

Kenneth L. Holmes, ed. Diaries and Letters from the Western Trails, 1852: The California Trail, vol. 4 of Covered Wagon Women. 1985; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. 303 pp. ISBN 0-8032-7277-4 (pb).

This collection of letters and diaries offers a glimpse into the lives and experiences of travelers on the California trail in 1852, seen through the words of six women. Holmes introduces and contextualizes each woman’s writings, then steps back and allows the sources to speak for themselves. The women describe the many hardships they and their families faced heading West on the overland trail, including encounters with Native Americans, disease, and personal tragedy, as well as the celebrations and small joys of life on the frontier.———Renée N. Lansley

Kenneth L. Holmes and David C. Duniway, eds. Dairies and Letters from the Western Trail, 1852, vol. 5 of Covered Wagon Women. 1986; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. xiii + 320 pp. ISBN 0-8032-7294-4 (pb).

This work, a collection of letters and diaries that chronicle the journey of women on the Western trails in 1852, reveals the significant contributions women made to the ideological landscape of the Western frontier. In their diaries, women, such as Abigail Jane Scott, recorded their journeys, emotions, and family relationships, and described the frontier world as lonely and unfamiliar. Scott specifically expressed the anger women frequently felt toward their husbands who often forced them to travel. Through their descriptions, these women illustrated the dangers associated with their journeys West.———Cherisse R. Jones

Kenneth L. Holmes, ed. Diaries and Letters from the Western Trails, 1853–1854, vol. 6 of Covered Wagon Women. 1986; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. xi + 291 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8032-7295-2 (pb).

This is the latest reprint of editor Holmes’s original six-volume set of diaries and letters by nineteenth-century women trekking westward across the American plains. Volume 6 includes the diaries and writings of ten women with somewhat diverse backgrounds: three Kentucky sisters, born frontierswomen; a pregnant physician’s wife; an unmarried schoolteacher; an upper-class Englishwoman and Mormon convert; two Midwestern women farmers; and one fifteen-year-old and one nineteen-year-old woman. Several of these women traveled West to join religious communities in Oregon or Utah, some looked to join their husbands, and others sought to establish a new life with their families. Together, the passages offer valuable insight into these women’s experiences with day-to-day chores, family life, personal relationships, and the physical and mental challenges associated with survival on the frontier.———Gregory S. Wilson

Margaret Homans and Adrienne Munich, ed. Remaking Queen Victoria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xiii + 279 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-521-57379-3 (cl); 0-521-57485-4 (pb).

However established Queen Victoria’s importance in British history and culture might be, she remains the somewhat enigmatic epitome of her age. Remaking Queen Victoria, a modern reappraisal of this multifaceted figure, proposes to examine the making and changing fortunes of her image, and to reassess the complexity of this seemingly monolithic icon. The first part of this collection of essays investigates Victoria’s role in nationmaking—that is, the way in which her image shaped and promulgated ideas of nationhood and imperial power. Part 2 deals with the contrasted aspects of her image as a female ruler; she appeared as both a domestic monarch who modeled middle-class womanhood and the unrivaled head of a global empire. Other essays examine how, throughout her reign, she embodied many conflicting components of the self-contradictory ideology of the time and served its political, social, and economic needs. The final section demonstrates how vividly her influence lives on in the postcolonial world.———Blandine Chambost

Pamela Horn. The Victorian Town Child. New York: New York University Press, 1997. viii + 248 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8147-3575-4 (cl).

Horn explores the lives of nineteenth-century English children in the era of industrial and population boom by examining the living and working conditions that led to the many reforms of the late Victorian era: the eventual necessity for mass schooling separated from work environments, the development of social programs for child welfare, and the continued struggle to improve the quality of life for Britain’s youth. Horn considers the effects of varying class backgrounds, regional wealth or poverty, and localized urban development in her examination of children’s daily activities. She also discusses the development of the increasingly gender-distinct spheres of influence by considering not only familial roles for boys and girls, but also such social issues as the changing age of “consent” for female child prostitutes. Horn’s myriad anecdotal accounts, moving photographs, and revealing illustrations will bring this historical period to life not only for historians, but also for anyone interested in the interplay between socioeconomic systems, quality of life, and the heightening of consciousness.———Leigh Burrill

John Howard, ed. Carryin’ On in the Lesbian and Gay South. New York: New York University Press, 1997. xii + 402 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8147-6513-4 (cl); 0-8147-3560-6 (pb).

This collection of fifteen essays spans a wide section of southern history, both in geography and chronology. The authors examine events and people in cities and states across the South from the nineteenth century to the present. The introductory and concluding chapters are more theoretical, examining the challenges lesbian and gay studies present to historians’ understanding of the South and the impact of a southern perspective on the field of lesbian and gay studies, a field which largely has been dominated by a bicoastal, urban perspective. Some essays focus on notable southerners—such as William Alexander Percy and Lillian Smith—while others look at aspects of gay and lesbian life in southern cities including Memphis, Atlanta, Louisville, Charleston, and New Orleans.———Pippa Holloway

Lucinda Jarrett. Stripping in Time: A History of Erotic Dancing. London: Pandora, 1997. x + 246 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-04-440968-0 (pb).

As the title suggests, Jarrett traces the history of erotic dancing—including sacred dance, striptease, revues, and burlesque—over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beginning in 1860s Paris and London with British Lydia Thompson and the infamous La Goulue (Louise Weber), who danced at the Moulin Rouge, and ending with the thriving sex industry of post-Soviet Eastern Europe and contemporary Egypt, where the sacred art of belly dancing has come under increased scrutiny and censure from Islamic fundamentalists, Jarrett uses diaries, newspapers, court cases, and censorship battles to both document the lives of a few influential dancers—in first-person fictional monologues—and place them in their historical context. The purpose of the book is “to bring to light the unwritten histories of these women, to reclaim their art from the moralists, the social scientists, and the censors, and put it back where it belongs—in the hands of the artists themselves” (6).———Heather Lee Miller

Cynthia A. Kierner. Southern Women in Revolution, 1776–1800: Personal and Political Narratives. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. xxviii + 253 pp. ISBN 1-57003-218-1 (cl).

The five chapters in this book feature introductory essays, followed by selected petitions from women of all social backgrounds, black and white, to the assemblies of South Carolina and North Carolina. The author uses ninety-eight petitions from twenty-five years to illustrate the personal and economic effects of the war as well as the ideological effects of the Revolution’s egalitarian rhetoric, contending that the petitions “constitute the largest body of women’s writing about the American Revolution and its impact on civilian life” (xx). The first chapter examines southern women’s activity during the war, while the second shows that the economic repercussions of the war extended well into the 1790s. In the third chapter, Kierner illustrates the efforts Loyalist women made to reclaim their confiscated property. Looking at the rhetoric of the petitions, chapter 4 demonstrates that most women did not seriously contest their continued political subservience. Finally, in chapter 5, Kierner argues that Revolutionary ideals empowered slaves, free blacks, and poor white women to seek manumission, extended property rights, and divorces in unprecedented numbers, appeals usually made in vain.———Bradley Ellis Austin

Mira Ryczke Kimmelman. Echoes from the Holocaust: A Memoir. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997. xxiv + 176 pp.; ill.; maps. ISBN 0-87049-968-8 (cl); 0-87049-956-4 (pb).

Born in 1923, Mira Ryczke Kimmelman, a Holocaust survivor, traces her life from her youth in Danzig (currently Gdansk in Poland) through her horrific experiences during World War II to her present-day life in the United States. Since leaving Danzig in 1939, Mira relocated to numerous places, including a ghetto in Tomaszów as well as Blizyn-Majdanek, Auschwitz, and finally Bergen-Belsen, losing loved ones at almost every step of the way. Dehumanization, death, thirst, roll calls, and starvation were daily encounters in her life. Mira also, however, portrays the love, friendship, and even help from some SS officers that gave her strength to survive. In a few instances of her memoir, she shows how women’s camp experiences differed from men’s, arguing that women were more likely to survive. In her epilogue, she lists the names, ages, and places of death of her family—twenty people in all, including her brother and mother. Her father and she were the only survivors who lived in camps; an uncle and two cousins survived through hiding. In the last portion of her memoir, Mira discusses her life after the Holocaust—her marriage to another survivor, children, immigration to the United States, and subsequent visits to Poland. This is another great addition to the many testimonials of the Holocaust.———Basia A. Nowak

Sally Gregory Kohlstedt and Helen E. Longino, eds. Women, Gender, and Science: New Directions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. 222 pp. ISBN 0-226-30753-0 (cl); 0-226-30754-9 (pb).

This volume offers an eclectic set of essays on the history, philosophy, and sociology of science, exploring the relations between women and science as well as gender and science. The collection contributes significantly to the history of the sciences and gender in Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and to the history of women within the twentieth-century German scientific community. Robert Nye contends that late-eighteenth-century intellectuals incorporated many of the masculine codes of honor, established by the aristocracy, into a system of ethics for scientists, while Ann Shteir describes the ways in which male scholars excluded women from botany in nineteenth-century England. Estelle Cohen demonstrates that women in Europe were able to use anatomical observations to support claims for equality until the late eighteenth century, at which time male intellectuals increasingly used such observations to claim that women were inferior. Evelyn Fox Keller and Elvira Scheich offer biographies on leading women in German science in the twentieth century.———David Madden

Anna Olga Koloski-Ostrow and Claire L. Lyons, eds. Naked Truths: Women, Sexuality, and Gender in Classical Art and Archaeology. New York: Routledge, 1997. xv + 315 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-415-15995-4 (cl).

This collection’s goal is to uncover the truth of gender identity in the Greco-Roman world and introduce a feminist approach to the archaeology and art history of this era. To achieve this, the contributors have applied recent developments in the study of sex differences to representations of men and women in classical iconography, art, literary texts, and inscriptions. The volume includes a theoretical introduction by the editors, eleven case studies, and a conclusion by Natalie Boymel Kampen that summarizes the common arguments of the contributors. Two of the most prominent concerns of the contributors are understanding the role of the audience in art and questioning the reception of these gendered images in relation to civic and religious values of the community. The authors also discuss how desire is constructed within a specific cultural frame rather than as a natural or inevitable process.———Matthew P. Romaniello

Kate Lacey. Feminism Frequencies: Gender, German Radio, and the Public Sphere, 1923–1945. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. ix + 299 pp. ISBN 0-472-09616-8 (cl); 0-472-06616-1 (pb).

Feminist Frequencies features radio as the nexus of gendered public and private discourses and economic, social, cultural, and political modernity. Spanning years of significant changes and continuities in Germany, Lacey examines the impact of radio’s entrance into society five years after women gained the vote. Furthermore, she shows how variations in political policies affected the uses of radio and its target audiences. In the concluding chapter, Lacey superimposes public sphere theory (primarily in the models of Jürgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt) onto the role of the media in the transition from a democratic to a totalitarian state. She also presents a relevant exploration of the public/private dichotomy in current scholarship. A bonus to this well-documented, insightful book is a sample of radio programming for women from the 1930s.

Ron Lackmann. Women of the Western Frontier in Fact, Fiction, and Film. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1997. 209 pp.; ill.; appendixes. ISBN 0-7864-0400-0 (cl).

Lackmann presents the subject of women in the nineteenth-century American West, mingling fact and fiction as he uses such sources as contemporary newspaper clippings and circulars, novels, stories and gossip, and twentieth-century accounts told on screen. Admitting difficulty in discerning reality from rumor, Lackmann reinforces this dilemma with an absence of documentation, even for quoted interviews. This contextualized and highly readable book shows the hardships and humor for such women as those who answered Elizabeth Farnham’s New York circular call: “‘Wanted: Women Go West!’” (115). Offering three appendixes listing films and television series in which women play prominent roles, this book is a handy resource for western lore in American memory and media.

Louise Lamphere, Helena Ragone, and Patricia Zavella, eds. Situated Lives: Gender and Culture in Everyday Life. New York: Routledge, 1997. 493 pp. ISBN 0-415-91806-5 (cl); 0-415-91807-3 (pb).

Comprised of twenty-six ethnographic case studies and an introduction, this collection explores shifting meanings of gender and culture in the United States and in developing countries. The contributors cover such topics as women’s bodies and reproduction, the construction of family, individual and collective resistance in the workplace, and representations of gender and sexuality in colonial and postcolonial societies. Furthermore, contributors analyze the meaning and effects of a global economy, the development of biotechnology (particularly as it affects reproduction), and international communication. The breadth of this work makes it particularly beneficial for introductory courses on women’s issues.———Basia A. Nowak

Roger N. Lancaster and Micaela di Leonardo, eds. The Gender/Sexuality Reader: Culture, History, Political Economy. New York: Routledge, 1997. ix + 574 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-415-91004-8 (cl); 0-415-91005-6 (pb).

Perhaps more appropriately titled “The Gender/Sexuality/Body Reader,” this anthology of mostly reprinted articles brings together the work of over forty authors, who explore the intersections of those categories with culture, history, and political economy worldwide and over time. Divided into sections that address such issues as the embodiment of history and politics of representation, family and state, social construction of identities, marking the body and the body as text, “polyvalent pleasures,” and new theoretical frameworks about performance and the body (to name but a few), Lancaster and Leonardo’s collection will provide a handy sourcebook of some of the most influential writings on sexuality, gender, and the body from the past two decades.———Heather Lee Miller

Joan B. Landes, ed. Feminism, the Public, and the Private. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. x + 505 pp. ISBN 0-19-875203-2 (cl); 0-19-875202-4 (pb).

Nineteen articles and an introductory essay by the editor encompass twenty-five years of reflection by feminist intellectuals upon the meanings and boundaries of the categories “public” and “private.” Landes’s introduction provides an overview of the articles and concludes with a brief summary of the historiography and diversity of feminist thought about the public and private spheres. The collection is organized into four sections, beginning with four essays that address the public/private distinction in feminist theory and the relationship between public/private and male/female. The second section consists of five articles, grounded in historical and empirical research, that examine the modern liberal public sphere in France, Britain, Australia, and the United States. In part 3, the authors investigate contemporary popular culture, including the areas of law, media, politics, art, sexuality, gender, and feminism. The fourth and last section, “Public and Private Identity: Questions for a Feminist Public Sphere,” resembles the first in its attention to political philosophy and theory. All of the pieces, minus the introduction, are reprints of published journal articles or book chapters.

———Susan Kathleen Freeman

Ching Kwan Lee. Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. xiii + 210 pp.; tables; figures; appendix. ISBN 0-520-21125-1 (cl); 0-520-21127-8 (pb).

Two sharply different worlds of labor emerge from this sociological examination of gendered factory work on either side of the Hong Kong border before 1997. In Shenzhen, China, Lee finds a shop dominated by “localistic despotism,” where regional networks maintain tight control over the “maiden workers.” In contrast, the “matron workers” in the Hong Kong branch of the same firm enjoy a culture of “familial hegemony,” integrating their family responsibilities and work schedules. Lee argues that this difference arises from the sociology of the local labor markets and suggests the need for a feminist theory of production politics. The author gained the trust of women in both factories by working alongside them on the production line, and their stories give voice to the lives of these working women.———Carol C. Chin

Lily Xiao Hong Lee and A. D. Stefenowska, eds. The Qing Period, 1644–1911, vol. 10 of Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women, ed. Clara Wing-chung Ho. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1998. xxxvi + 387 pp. ISBN 0-7656-0043 (cl).

Unlike other well-known biographical dictionaries, such as Eminent Chines’s of the Ch’ing period, which has only a scattering of women among hundreds of entries, this book is entirely devoted to women of the same time span (1644–1911). Its approximately two hundred entries are listed alphabetically. The usefulness of the book is enhanced by cross-referencing names by categories, ranging from poets and imperial consorts to moral paradigms and newsworthy persons (with some in more than one category). While many entries deal with such well-known figures as the Empress Dowerer Cixi, the prize-winning embroiderer Shen Shou, and the educator-journalist-revolutionary Qui Jin, many are on relatively obscure individuals. Thus it is a giant step forward in removing our ignorance of some deserving women. The book includes useful bibliographies attached to most of the longer entries, and a glossary matching English and Chinese renditions of the names.———Samuel C. Chu

Valerie Lee. Granny Midwives and Black Women Writers: Double-Dutched Readings. New York: Routledge, 1997. xii + 202 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-415-91507-4 (cl); 0-415-91508-2 (pb).

This interdisciplinary study offers fresh insight into the rich cultural and intellectual heritage of African-American women. Through oral biographies, archival data, ethnographic materials, and personal interviews, Lee illustrates the significance of storytelling rituals as oral history and the centrality of healing and midwifery to the African-American experience. Using the metaphor of “double-dutched” readings, the author combines granny narratives with African-American women’s fiction to create a “meta-narrative” of historical oppression, resistance, and survival. She suggests that there exists a “dual cultural performance” practiced not only by granny midwives in the retelling of their stories, but also within the literary texts of their fictional counterparts. The first few chapters trace the historical and literary tradition of African-American women. The author then illustrates how black women writers provide a voice and textuality to granny narrators. Within this combination of folklore and history the reader is made aware of the interconnection and politics of race, class, and gender in African-American women’s literature.———Shannon L. Frystak

Ilse Abshagen Leitinger, ed. and trans. The Costa Rican Women’s Movement: A Reader. Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997. xi + 366 pp.; ill.; tables; no bibliography. ISBN 0-8229-3862-6 (cl); 0-8229-5543-1 (pb).

This work offers a broad vision of the women’s movement and feminism in Costa Rica during the early 1990s. The contributors, members of the Costa Rican women’s movement and/or feminists, argue that Costa Rican feminists are at the vanguard of contemporary feminism in Latin America and the world in large respect due to their principle of investigación-acción (action-oriented) feminist theory. Authors analyze an array of theoretical paradigms, representing the divergent ideologies that characterized the Costa Rican women’s movement. Themes under discussion include feminism in Costa Rica, women as historical actors, civil rights and discrimination, women in the arts, and the state of women’s studies. In short, this work makes visible women who have received little attention in past contributions on Costa Rican society.———Sherwin K. Bryant

Deborah Lyons. Gender and Immortality: Heroines in Ancient Greek Myth and Cult. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997. xvii + 269 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-691-01100-1 (cl).

Lyons sets out to challenge the narrow focus of study of ancient Greek hero cult by arguing that the heroine should be regarded as a separate religious and mythic category and one which makes it necessary to modify our understanding of divine/mortal relationships. Using evidence ranging from ancient travel guides to inscriptions and vase depictions, the author first establishes the heroine as a female figure of epic, myth, and cult distinct from other mortal women or goddesses. Then, she questions the concept of “ritual antagonism,” which defines the hero’s relationship with divinity. By studing heroines associated with Dionysus and an appreciation for a developing relationship between Artemis and Iphigeneia, the author shows that the heroine’s interaction with the gods is centered on an idea of ritual exchange. Based on privileged access to divinity, the heroine possesses a mediating role in cult that is essential to divinity itself. A catalogue of over five hundred heroines rounds off this well-researched and thought-provoking study.———Elton Barker

Joseph Mahon. Existentialism, Feminism, and Simone de Beauvoir. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. xi + 241 pp. ISBN 0-312-17606-6 (cl).

This detailed overview of Simone de Beauvoir’s major works opposes orthodox perceptions that exclude her from the canon of existentialist philosophy and view her existentialism and existentialist feminism as further developments of Sartrean (masculinist) philosophy. The author analyzes de Beauvoir’s early works of the 1940s and gives the historical background and philosophical foundations of The Second Sex, as well as summarizes responses to it from 1962 through 1994, revealing the originality of her philosophy. De Beauvoir’s distinctive philosophy emerges in her defense of existentialism and in her conception of normative ethics in The Ethics of Ambiguity where she distanced herself from Sartre to “an extent that is oceanic” (88). Mahon argues that the main philosophical ideas and distinctions in The Second Sex originate in de Beauvior’s earlier writings and are her own creation rooted in Western philosophy. The author reevaluates and defends de Beauvior’s work as her own version of existentialism and existentialist feminism.———Ieva Zake

Megan Matchinske. Writing, Gender, and State in Early Modern England: Identity Formation and the Female Subject. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xi + 247 pp. ISBN 0-521-62254-9 (cl).

This study explores the shift in private conscience in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England from individually generated and spiritually motivated to state-inscribed and gender-inflected. Matchinske charts this transformation with four case studies of women represented in literature, spread across two centuries and coinciding with major political and social upheavals. Anne Askew was a Protestant martyr in the English Reformation, recorded in terms of selfless religiosity which disguised the underlying secular, particularly political, motivations of her life. Margaret Clitherow was executed for harboring a priest in the Counter Reformation, and Matchinske uncovers her life from later accounts written by men. The work of Ester Sowernam, praising female chastity in marriage, is reinterpreted as a critique of transforming marriage laws and marital status. The apocalyptic tracts of Lady Eleanor Davies in the 1640s recorded the contradictions of the female subject and state regulation. In the end, Matchinske believes her work should serve as the beginning of a dialogue about gender in early modern England. ———Matthew P. Romaniello

Edward J. McCaffery. Taxing Women. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. xiii + 310 pp. ill. ISBN 0-226-55557-7 (cl).

Taxing Women documents the negative consequences of the U.S. tax code on women and their families. McCaffery traces the ways that taxes reflect the political and social agenda of those in power and the historical times in which they live. Today, married women are taxed at a higher rate than married men because they are defined as “secondary earners.” However, the effects of the tax code for women vary depending on a family’s income. Poor women are rewarded for being single parents, while women from affluent families are rewarded for remaining out of the labor force altogether. In contrast, middle-income women must choose between highly taxed, paid work or full-time homemaking with a subsequent rise in husbands’ hours of work to compensate. Arguing that the status quo is unacceptable, McCaffery identifies partial solutions to reduce gender inequality in taxation policies. These include separate filing for married couples, increased child care deductions, and tax breaks rather than penalties for spouses earning the lower of two incomes (typically women).———Michael McCrary

Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shoalt, eds. Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspective. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. viii + 551 pp. ISBN 0-8166-2648-0 (cl); 0-8166-2649-9 (pb).

This collection of twenty-eight essays offers itself as a “guidebook” to postcolonial theory, giving perspectives on colonialism, the idea of the nation, culture, and identities. These perspectives are grounded in the premise that each of these social and political elements result from a system of ideological production whose highly complex workings should be examined. Thus, for example, by looking at contested national identities—among Palestinians, South Africans in the 1980s, Sephardim in Israel, and the peoples of the Balkans—the concept of “nation” as a solid, fixed concept crumbles, revealing it instead to be a disputed, contradictory, and historically contingent idea. Similarly, racial and gender identities are mined in this work for evidence of their diverse cultural constructions in essays on such varied topics as Western collectors of African art and ideas about sexual morality in colonial governments. Examining race and gender from this standpoint demonstrates not only the complexity of these identities but also their essentialness to the nation or culture that produced them.———Pippa Holloway

Rufe McCombs and Karen Spears Zacharias. Benched: The Memoirs of Judge Rufe McCombs. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1997. xi + 218 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-86554-570-7 (cl).

Zacharias aided Judge McCombs in the task of setting a life’s worth of memories down on paper. The authors open with a chatty account of a childhood incident that occurred in 1924, impairing McCombs’s vision and channeling her energies toward a career in law. The authors disclose some of the distractions, both pleasures and hardships, that McCombs encountered as she progressed in her career, with McCombs ultimately becoming a Georgia superior court judge in 1982. Although the authors acknowledge that McCombs often weighed her duties as a wife and mother against her ambition as a lawyer and judge, the self-effacing tone of the book limits any broader discussion of gender issues. Nonetheless, the authors reveal insights about the issues and choices faced by ambitious, college-educated women in an era in which many more women stood before the kitchen sink than sat behind a judicial bench.———Jeanette Davis Mantilla

Deborah Kuhn McGregor. From Midwives to Medicine: The Birth of American Gynecology. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998. xii + 273 pp.; ill.; no bibliography. ISBN 0-8135-2571-3 (cl); 0-8135-2572-1 (pb).

McGregor traces the emergence of the gynecological profession in the mid-nineteenth century through the lens of one of its most prominent practitioners, J. Marion Sims. Although some of her sources and analysis reflect a traditional focus on prominent practitioners, she studies how these physicians interacted with a broad spectrum of female patients. Through a careful analysis of medical records, McGregor convincingly argues that a patient’s class, race, and gender often determined a physician’s willingness to perform experimental, and sometimes controversial, gynecological surgery. Her study also traces the founding of the Woman’s Hospital of the State of New York; relationships among patients, nurses, and doctors in the hospital; and the evolution of certain medical procedures, such as treatment for vesico-vaginal fistulas (tears resulting from childbirth) and ovarian surgeries. This work is a revised edition of the author’s 1989 publication, Sexual Surgery and the Origin of Gynecology: J. Marion Sims, His Hospital and His Patients.———Kirsten E. Gardner

Clare Midgley, ed. Gender and Imperialism. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1998. xii + 228 pp. ISBN 0-7190-4819-2 (cl); 0-7190-4820-6 (pb).

The nine essays in this volume combine gender theory and colonial and postcolonial studies to discuss the British Empire’s effect on colonizing and colonized men and women. Part 1 examines the imposition of the British state on India. Himani Bannerji studies the debate surrounding the Indian Age of Consent Act as part of a hegemonic legitimation-producing process and Jane Haggis conducts a poststructuralist discursive analysis of British missionary women’s narratives. In the second section, authors discuss reactions to imperialism. Padma Anagol reveals that many of the Indian women who converted from Hinduism to Christianity did so as part of a feminist critique of Hinduism, developing a strong feminist consciousness in the process. Margaret Ward emphasizes women’s agency in Irish nationalism and Marilyn Lake argues that the Australian frontier led Australian feminists to shape their political authority as protectors and mothers. Hilary Beckles studies the complexity of enslaved women’s resistance. Part 3 considers the influence of empire within Britain. Midgley shows how the empire influenced early feminism and created a “triple discourse” for feminists to compare the conditions of women in Britain to colonial slavery, African polygamy, and Oriental harems. Catherine Hall critiques Anthony Trollope’s racial descriptions of the colonies, including his belief that inferior races could improve through labor and a strong familial and domestic order while Barbara Bush concludes with a study of interwar female activism on imperial and domestic racism.———Aaron B. Retish

Lotte Motz. The Faces of the Goddess. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. vii + 280 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-19-508967-7 (cl).

This extensive challenge to the notion that early humans worshiped a nurturing, maternal earth Goddess or Great Mother is based on examinations of such female deities as the Akkas in Northern Eurasia, Sedna of the Inuit people of North America, Saule of Latvia, Nintur of Mesopotamia, Cybele of Anatolia, Demeter of Greece, Cihuacoatl of Mexico, and Amaterasu of Japan. These goddesses, Motz argues, are not forms of the Great Mother, and they differ in important ways from that presumed universal archetype. Most did not derive their significance from the power of the womb; not all were related to the earth’s fertility; and they were not universally peaceful and nurturing. The contemporary Goddess cult, she concludes, may serve some contemporary needs, but its biological preoccupation obscures the complex natures of the various female divinities of the ancient world.———Susan M. Hartmann

Lucy Eldersveld Murphy and Wendy Hamand Venet. Midwestern Women: Work, Community, and Leadership at the Crossroads. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. xiv + 276 pp.; maps; tables. ISBN 0-253-33307-5 (cl); 0-253-21133-6 (pb).

Midwestern Women covers the broad period from contact between indigenous people and women of European descent to the 1980s and addresses the historical experiences of American Indian, African-American, European-American, and Mexican-American women. Contributors look at some familiar aspects of women’s lives: the overlapping of public and private spheres, work in voluntary organizations, paid and unpaid labor, and community building. The essays in this anthology are focused on women of the Midwest and they identify a particular regional experience without failing to recognize the similarities between processes of change and evolving identities in the Midwest and those in other regions. The first four chapters are biographies of individual women, followed by essays considering women as parts of groups and communities. The anthology also includes a bibliography of works on women of the Midwest.———Chad Montrie

Nancy A. Naples. Grassroots Warriors: Activist Mothering, Community Work, and the War on Poverty. New York: Routledge, 1998. x + 285 pp.; map; tables; appendix. ISBN 0-415-91024-2 (cl); 0-415-91025-0 (pb).

This work examines the lives of over sixty community women employed in the Community Action Programs of the 1970s War on Poverty, in New York and Philadelphia. Through oral interviews and her own feminist/activist experience, Naples provides insight into the relationship between the state and poor, and into urban community women whose work lives and worldviews have been circumscribed by changes in the economic and political contexts of their daily lives. Thus, in contrast to the prevailing myth of the dependent welfare mother, Naples illustrates that the community women of her study contributed significant paid and unpaid services toward improving the lives of their families and communities in which they lived. Moreover, these women became central figures in their communities and empowered other women, including their daughters, to follow in their footsteps. By comparing women’s experiences, Naples shows how race, class, and gender influence the ways in which different strategies for grassroots community organizing are developed and employed.———Shannon L. Frystak

Natalie A. Naylor and Maureen O. Murphy, eds. Long Island Women: Activists and Innovators. Interlaken, N.Y.: Empire State Books, 1998. 346 pp.; ill.; table. ISBN 1-55787-151-5 (cl); 1-55787-150-7 (pb).

The brief essays in this volume introduce thirty-two women who lived or worked on Long Island, New York. Organized chronologically within seven sections, the essays cover diverse topics, including women who challenged gender boundaries; women whose activities broadened the domestic sphere; women in social services, community organizations, and the workforce; famous women; and feminist activists. The reader will meet mid-seventeenth-century women who protested the persecution of Quakers in Massachusetts and nineteenth- and twentieth-century Catholic nuns. Native American women are discussed in two essays, while one essay focuses on an African-American founder of a suburban settlement house. From the simultaneously conventional and unusual Smith sisters who entered adulthood at the turn of the century and the editor of Newsday to Marianne Moore who poeticized the Brooklyn Dodgers and the geneticist Barbara McClintock, this book introduces brief glimpses of numerous interesting women. Many of the essays as well as sections on “Long Island’s Nationally Notable Women” and a bibliography on Long Island women emerged from a 1996 conference sponsored by the Long Island Studies Institute at Hofstra University. As the editors note, this volume makes a “significant beginning” in the recovery of Long Island history that should encourage further scholarship not only on this area but also on local histories in general.———Marilyn E. Hegarty

Lisa Pine. Nazi Family Policy, 1933–1945. Oxford: Berg, 1997. xii + 208 pp.; ill. ISBN 1-86973-902-4 (cl); 1-85973-907-5 (pb).

In this extensively researched monograph, Pine examines Nazi family ideology and policy under the Third Reich. She explores positive policies toward “valuable” families within the national community, and investigates the implantation of eugenic, marriage, divorce, contraception, abortion, and welfare policies meant to encourage an increased birthrate and racial homogeneity. In addition, Pine analyzes the methods the Nazi regime used to inculcate German society with its family ideals. These measures included the socialization of German girls as future mothers, the use of school textbooks to instill Nazi family ideals, and the “education” of women as homemakers. The final chapters discuss Nazi policy toward atypical families—such as the kinderreich (rich in children), asocial, and Jewish families. The kinderreich family, an Aryan family with four or more children, was proclaimed as the ideal. With the “undesirable” asocial and Jewish families, Pine explores negative policies that evolved from discrimination to eventual destruction.———Mark E. Spicka

Ute Planert. Antifeminismus im Kaiserreich: Diskurs, soziale Formation und politische Mentalität. Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1998. 447 pp. ISBN 3-525-35787-7 (pb).

Planert examines the antifeminist movement during the German monarchy which promoted traditional gender roles and counteracted the efforts of the various factions of the women’s movement to achieve women’s emancipation. Planert analyzes the arguments of antifeminist discourses that increased during the 1890s. She then sheds light upon the social groups that promoted antifeminist thought, ranging from the lower middle class to the nobility, by using social historical analysis. Furthermore, Planert discusses antifeminist organizations, such as the Deutscher Bund zur Bekämpfung der Frauenemanzipation (German Association for the Struggle against Women’s Emancipation), which played a considerable role in forming an antifeminist network. Finally, she underscores the protofascist aspects of antifeminist thought, its incorporation into the national-socialist movement during the Weimar Republic, and the persistence of antifeminist thought during the Third Reich. Planert’s book fills a gap in previous studies of women’s history and gender studies of the German monarchy by shifting the focus from the German women’s movement to the widely ignored discourses of antifeminist proponents.———Jennifer Anne Davy

Charlene Porsild. Gamblers and Dreamers: Women, Men, and Community in the Klondike. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1998. xiv + 250 pp.; ill.; maps; tables. ISBN 0-7748-0650-8 (cl); 0-7748-0651-6 (pb).

In this highly readable and detailed tribute to the women and men who took risks in going to and establishing the community of Dawson City in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, readers will meet the individuals who encountered the adventures of the Yukon and the 1898 Klondike gold rush. Porsild dispels many myths associated with this time and place, as well as with North American gold rushes in general. She also examines these white and nonwhite interlopers’ interactions with and their impact on the indigenous residents of the area. Utilizing diaries, letters, memoirs, police records, and census material (including birthplace, gender, marital status, ethnicity, religious affiliation, and occupation), Porsild offers a qualitative, statistical history. This portrait of a community of nearly thirty thousand people from around the world provides a social history that digs deep into the complexities of human experience.

Amanda Porterfield. Mary Lyon and the Mount Holyoke Missionaries. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. xi + 179 pp.; no bibliography. ISBN 0-19-511301-2 (cl).

Graduates of Mount Holyoke College were prominent in the nineteenth-century women’s foreign missionary movement, led by the vision of seminary founder Mary Lyon. Porterfield traces the importance of Lyon’s Protestant theology both in promoting women’s education based on disinterested benevolence and “republican motherhood,” and in inspiring missionary zeal through Puritan self-sacrifice. Three case studies examine the unexpected outcome of these theological concerns in northwest Persia, western India, and Natal. The missionaries’ cultural biases and preoccupation with their own self-sacrifice prevented them from understanding forces of cultural and social change and living up to their ideals of egalitarianism and female community. Although they failed in one sense, Porterfield suggests that their efforts often spurred the development of indigenous or hybrid reform cultures that promoted women’s education and social welfare.———Carol Chin

Susan E. Pritchett Post. Women in Modern Albania: Firsthand Accounts of Culture and Conditions from Over 200 Interviews. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1998. ix + 302 pp.; ill.; map; no bibliography. ISBN 0-7864-0468-X (cl).

Seeking to depict the hardships faced by twentieth-century Albanian women and the sources of their resilience, Post compiled this book of oral histories during a three-year stint in postcommunist Albania. The interviewees range from World War II partisans to the first Miss Albania pageant winner, and include agricultural workers and victims of political persecution under the isolationist regime of Enver Hoxha. The book is divided into three sections based on the age of the subjects; short narratives by rural and urban women on family and significant personal events alternate with longer interviews with intellectuals and prominent women. Often recounted are lives stamped by extreme poverty, monotony, and social restrictions, which the author contextualizes through chapters on Albania’s historical and political background. The subjects were also asked about the sources of their strength, including the role of religious faith in their lives. Post’s conclusions stress the significance of family and tradition, as well as the spirituality of Albania’s Muslim and Christian women.———Katherine David-Fox

Lisa Raphals. Sharing the Light: Representations of Women and Virtue in Early China. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. xxiii + 348 pp.; ill.; tables. ISBN 0-7914-3855-4 (cl); 0-7914-3856-2 (pb).

Raphals challenges the predominant interpretation of Chinese women as passive victims throughout China’s traditional past and contends that Chinese conceptualizations of gender have changed over time. She analyzes the transformations in the conceptualization of the feminine yin and the masculine yang from a complementary distinction in the early Han dynasty to that of an oppositional and hierarchical distinction by the later Han dynasty. The ten chapters examine the evolutionary changes of traditional Chinese texts’ portrayals of Chinese women’s roles in the family and state. In earlier writings of the warring states period to the Six dynasties, Chinese women often were portrayed as active intellectual and moral agents who had contributed significantly to their families and their states. Due to the rise of neo-Confucian conservatism in the Song and subsequent dynasties, biographies of virtuous and intellectual women were replaced gradually by interpretations of women’s roles as daughters, wives, and mothers. For textual analysis, Raphals consults numerous Chinese philosophical and historical texts from the Zhou period to the Qing dynasty.———Doris T. Chang

Jennifer Ring. The Political Consequences of Thinking: Gender and Judaism in the Work of Hannah Arendt. New York: State University of New York Press, 1997. xii + 358 pp. ISBN 0-7914-3483-4 (cl).

This work examines the gendered and religious implications of the debate centering on Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. Ring contends that Arendt, as a woman, received a particularly hostile response in part because she represented a threat to the traditionally masculine image of the Jewish scholar and to the emergent sense of masculinity inherent in images of the new state of Israel. Arendt is likened to unconventional thinkers in other minority groups who have also dared to question the conventional wisdom of their group. In this respect, the author incisively relates the Eichmann controversy to current debates on tribalism, multiculturalism, and objectivity. In Arendt’s attempts to forge a new way of thinking about political and ethical issues, Ring finds evidence of an independent, attempted negotiation between traditional rabbinic thought and Western philosophical ideals of rationality and justice, with the aim of forestalling further tragedies like those of the twentieth century.———Jason T. Kuznicki

Junius P. Rodriguez, ed. The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery, 2 vols. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 1997. xxxiii + 805 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-87436-885-5 (cl).

This massive two-volume encyclopedia is the first comprehensive overview of human slavery. The set contains over six hundred entries arranged alphabetically and written by over two hundred scholars from around the world. The entries cover important historical figures, events, peoples, and places; law cases and legal phrases; terminology; historians and historiography; and more. Each entry contains a brief bibliography and is cross-referenced to other entries in the set. Five geographic maps are located at the beginning of both volumes: Africa (West, Eastern, Central, and Southern), the African Diaspora, the Caribbean, and the United States (circa 1860–1861). The editor opens the first volume with a historiographical essay offering a fine overview of the history of slavery and the common themes that emerge throughout various world slave systems. The second volume contains an extensive index as well as a comprehensive bibliography divided by geographic region.———Robert J. Zalimas, Jr.

Kenneth D. Rose. American Women and the Repeal of Prohibition. New York: New York University Press, 1996. xix + 215 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8147-7464-4 (cl).

Rose has written what he calls “conservative history,” a narrative that analyzes conservative groups. He explores the demise of the Eighteenth, or Prohibition, Amendment in 1933, focusing on the influence of the large number of well-organized women who banded together to promote its repeal. Rose argues that repeal advocates had a curious approach to repeal using the same rationale—home protection—as the antirepeal forces while deemphasizing the individual liberty argument that other repeal groups promoted. Rose concludes that repeal women’s reliance on a secular moralism as opposed to the prohibition forces’ use of religious-based arguments won the day with legislators.———Caryn E. Neumann

Leila J. Rupp. Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997. xiii + 327 pp.; ill.; tables. ISBN 0-691-01676-3 (cl); 0-691-01675-5 (pb).

Using the records of the International Council of Women, International Alliance of Women, and Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, this work traces the development of the first-wave international women’s movement from the late nineteenth century through the Second World War. It investigates the successes and failures of activist women (as individuals and as a group) in forming an international, feminist collective identity. Rupp addresses the issue of inclusion versus exclusion, the impact of nationalism (in particular after World War I), and the “politics of personal interaction.” Challenges from inside and outside the movement continually pushed women to define and redefine what it meant to be a feminist internationalist. The international women’s movement was a vital, dynamic group of women who struggled to define their own goals and collective identity as well as influence world politics in general.———Renée N. Lansley

Rosemary Sales. Women Divided: Gender, Religion, and Politics in Northern Ireland. London: Routledge, 1997. xiv + 236 pp.; maps; tables. ISBN 0-415-13765-9 (cl); 0-415-13766-7 (pb).

This work addresses the marginalization of women and discussions of gender in the literature dealing with the “troubles” in Northern Ireland during the past twenty-five years. Although women have played an integral part in the peacemaking process, their presence ironically has been noticeably absent from the formal, high-powered, political process of establishing a lasting peace. Sales traces the development and extension of two cultural and historical traditions within Northern Ireland, based in political, religious, and economic differences, and lays out the implications for women within each of these groups. She demonstrates that women have been traditionally much less visible than men within both communities, but more so within the Protestant community. She further delves into the implications for bridging the multiple divisions among the women of Northern Ireland, while responding to the charge that placing women’s issues before political, religious, or economic concerns breeds divisiveness. This study affirms that sectarian concerns have and will continue to shape women’s roles, places, and concerns within Northern Ireland.———Laura J. Hilton

Kathleen Waters Sander. The Business of Charity: The Women’s Exchange Movement, 1832–1900. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. xi + 165 pp.; ill.; tables; no bibliography. ISBN 0-252-02401-X (cl); 0-252-06703-7 (pb).

Sander offers a glimpse into the life of Women’s Exchanges from their beginnings in 1832 as benevolent organizations that sought to help needy, genteel women support themselves. Consigning needlework done in the privacy of their homes, these women sold their wares through the exchanges which provided anonymity from disapproving peers. By the Centennial Exhibition in 1876, the exchanges became more democratic, establishing opportunities for all classes of women seeking respectable income opportunities. Sander demonstrates that middle- and upper-class women were well aware of their own financial vulnerability, and were thus propelled to develop supportive relationships to mitigate the effects of economic insecurity for all women. Spreading rapidly across the country, they provided not only financial support, but also managerial and business training for the scores of women involved in operating the exchanges. Sander argues that these societies blended the ideals of the women’s voluntary movement in the United States with the rise of commercialism in the Gilded Age, enabling women to push beyond socially constructed boundaries of the “woman’s sphere.”———Kate Clifford Larson

Ross Saunders. Outrageous Women, Outrageous God: Women in the First Two Generations of Christianity. Alexandria, Australia: E. J. Dwyer, 1996. x + 182 pp.; appendix. ISBN 0-85574-278-X (pb).

Outrageous Women is a study of women’s roles in the first few centuries of Christianity as recorded in biblical and patristical sources. Saunders explores both the constraints placed upon early Christian women by society culture and the extent to which women exceeded those boundaries in manifesting their faith. Two sections analyze Paul’s commentaries and epistles regarding women. One part examines the depiction of women in other biblical sources such as Peter and the book of the Hebrews, and the final section explores women’s roles in such post-Apostolic works as Eusebius, the Didache, and some apocryphal sources. It is Saunders’s contention that early Christian women, although substantially constrained by societal mores, stepped outside traditional boundaries to an unprecedented degree by expressing and promulgating their Christian faith.——— Lorraine Netrick Abraham

Heinrich Schipperges. Hildegard of Bingen: Healing and the Nature of the Cosmos. Trans. John A. Broadwin. Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1997. 122 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-55876-137-3 (cl); 1-55876138-1 (pb)

Schipperges offers critical analyses of some visionary writings of Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), a German abbess, composer, playwright, and poet who was considered the most remarkable woman of her time, arguably of the Middle Ages. Schipperges, an internationally renowned scholar of the history of medicine, is especially interested in Hildegard’s understanding of cosmology and her writings on natural sciences and medicine. The author offers a complex portrait of Hildegard as a wholly remarkable woman whose writings are the output of a pivotal time in European intellectual history: during the initial zeal of the Crusades, the reintroduction of Aristotelian philosophy into European scholarship, and the reexamination of Neoplatonism as an element of Christian theology. Schipperges presents an appreciation of the depth and breadth of Hildegard’s visions, and argues that modern medicine and theology could learn much from her writings.———Lorraine Netrick Abraham

Pamela Sharpe, ed. Women’s Work: The English Experience, 1650–1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. xii +368 pp.; tables; graphs. ISBN 0-340-67695-7 (cl); 0-340-67696-5 (pb).

The contributors to Women’s Work examine recent discoveries and historiographic trends concerning women and English labor throughout most of the early modern and modern periods. Although the time span requires a representative rather than a comprehensive treatment, the high quality of historiographic engagement gives many connections with other subjects in both gender and labor history. The essays also reveal how much remains to be done in the field, for many of the key texts of the histories of women’s work are decades old, their conclusions badly in need of revision in light of new data and methods. The authors discuss change and continuity in women’s labor history as well as agency and strategy in women’s occupations. Common themes include the debate over marginalization of women’s labor, the postulated (but contested) “golden age” of the preindustrial labor market, and the attempt to bring other perspectives to bear on issues of gendered labor history.———Jason T. Kuznicki

Benjamin F. Shearer and Barbara F. Shearer, eds. Notable Women in the Life Sciences: A Biographical Dictionary. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. xi + 440 pp. ISBN 0-313-29302-3 (cl).

This volume contains biographical essays on ninety-seven women scientists worldwide who have made significant contributions to the life sciences from antiquity to the present, with most profiles on twentieth-century scientists. Each entry provides a chronology outlining major life events and concludes with sources for further study. Many of the living scientists featured in the book contributed autobiographical statements or interviews to their profiles. The sixty-three practicing scientists and researchers who wrote the entries explain the lives of their subjects in clear prose aimed at a general readership.———Kathy Hoke

Robert Shoemaker and Mary Vincent, eds. Gender and History in Western Europe. London: Arnold Publishers, 1998. ix + 388 pp. ISBN 0-340-67693-0 (cl); 0-340-67694-9 (pb).

This collection brings together many noted names in women’s history and gender studies to examine topics of women’s history in Western Europe from 1500 to the present. Before addressing specific subject areas, the concept of gender as a theoretical concept and methodological tool is presented in an introduction by the editors as well as in chapters by Gisela Bock, Joan Scott, and Leonore Davidoff. Organized topically into the body and sexuality, separate spheres, religion, politics, and work, essays by such well-known scholars as Thomas Laquer, Catherine Hall, Phyllis Mack, Seth Koven, and Sonya Michel makeup the collection. Some of the materials the editors collected have been published previously. Shoemaker and Vincent emphasize the connection between the growth of women’s history and a new area of inquiry—history of masculinity.———Allyson Lowe

Anastasia Sims. The Power of Femininity in the New South: Women’s Organizations and Politics in North Carolina, 1880–1930. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. xiv + 286 pp.; ill. ISBN 1-57003-178-9 (cl).

This monograph examines women’s voluntary associations to show how women derived power from the southern construction of femininity while simultaneously living within femininity’s limitations. By looking at white and African-American associations, Sims explores how women of both races used the southern feminine ideal differently to enter the public political discourse. These women’s groups addressed such political issues as temperance, moral reform, education, and public health. In addition, Sims discusses women’s organized patriotic efforts—centered on promoting historical education and commemoration as well as mobilizing for the First World War—and the suffrage campaign. More generally, this book offers a detailed chronology of how women shaped North Carolina politics in a period that witnessed crucial developments in the state’s government and political order.———Pippa Holloway

Judith Hicks Stiehm, ed. It’s Our Military, Too! Women and the U.S. Military. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996. x + 309 pp. ISBN 1-56639-455-4 (cl); 1-56639-456-2 (pb).

This collection of essays strives to inform the public of women’s role in the U.S. military. Contributors discuss such issues as women in combat, women’s historic presence in the armed forces, and the gradual integration of women into the service academies and their role in these institutions. Furthermore, these issues are discussed from several viewpoints. Both lesbian and straight women on active duty relate their personal experiences, as do civilians working for the military and feminist writers who analyze the modern role of women in the armed forces. Through the use of these essays, Stiehm argues that civilian women should be more aware of the military, because it is as much their military as any man’s. In addition, the authors contend that many barriers still block the equal involvement of women in the military, especially weapons and equipment that could be better designed for women’s use.———Amanda L. Morgan

Barbara Sullivan. The Politics of Sex: Prostitution and Pornography in Australia since 1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. viii + 280 pp. ISBN 0-521-55408-X (cl); 0-521-55630-9 (pb).

A political history of the sex industry, this book examines the regulation of prostitution and pornography in Australia since World War II. Sullivan uses legal cases, legislative documents, men’s magazines, popular novels and films, newspapers, and demography to illuminate the relationships of changing ideas about what constitutes “normal” sexuality and sexual behavior, the creation of legislation pertaining to the sex industry, and how these shifting discourses have shaped present debates about pornography.———Heather Lee Miller

Penny Summerfield. Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1998. xiii + 338 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-7190-4460-X (cl); 0-7190-4461-8 (pb).

At first glimpse, analyzing the answers to the question of “Did the war change you and how?” would appear to be the major theme of this book. Fortunately, the book also explores areas of potentially greater relevance: namely a revision of theories of feminism and popular memory to enhance the understanding of the development of women’s wartime identities. Summerfield uses interviews of forty-two women to address these theoretical issues and to explore the use and validity of oral history. Her work adds a new dimension to the historical debate of the war’s effects on women’s subjectivities, focusing on how authorities explained anticipated changes to the women and how those ideas influenced female participants’ own interpretations. Summerfield concludes that there has never been a unified culture of women.———Cj Horn

Ena Tarrasch and Thel Spencer. Farewell to Fear: The Memoirs of a Holocaust Survivor. Springfield, Mass.: Denlinger Publishers, 1997. 84 pp. ISBN 0-87714-190-8 (pb).

Ena Tarrasch recollects her escape from Nazi Germany and her efforts to escape emotionally from the horrors of Nazism as an immigrant in Missouri. Born in 1913, Ena spent her childhood in Germany. She met and fell in love with the organist in her temple, Ernest Tarrasch, who immigrated to the United States to study medicine before the Nazi seizure of power. Ena remained in Germany to care for her aging mother and fled in 1938 after her mother’s death. During her escape, she was raped by two lesbian Nazis and arrived in Belgium physically and emotionally battered. She worked in England for a brief period as a governess before joining her husband Ernest in Springfield, Missouri, where she spent many years trying to overcome the psychological legacy of her experience in Nazi Germany, an experience that left her with fears of abandonment and other neuroses. Her family and career as a day care instructor slowly helped her shed her fears and empowered her to write her memoirs.———Stuart J. Hilwig

Bruce S. Thornton. Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997. xvii + 282 pp. ISBN 0-8133-3225-7 (cl).

Examining sexuality in Greek literature from approximately 700 b.c.-100 b.c., Thornton depicts the Greek view of sexuality as a source of tension and danger, and reexamines the concept of eros as a force for upheaval and peril rather than the more positive connotation given in modern times. Thornton argues that the Greeks saw all forms of sexuality as potentially dangerous and in need of control, and that the metaphors used to describe sex and love had much more immediate, powerful, and even frightening meaning to the Greeks than modern cultures assign them. He studies the goddess Aphrodite and links her to the beauty and danger of nature, and investigates Greek literary depictions of women as connected to the irrational, naturalistic side of human nature and contrasted to the rational male. Finally, Thornton examines the ways in which ancient Greeks attempted to control sexuality through philosophy, religion, and marriage.———Jennifer Anderson

Karen W. Tice. Tales of Wayward Girls and Immoral Women: Case Records and the Professionalization of Social Work. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. x + 260 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-252-02397-8 (cl); 0-252-06698-7 (pb).

Through an analysis of 150 case records written throughout this century by workers in five social service agencies, Tice examines the ways in which the emergence and standardization of caseworkers’ recordkeeping practices has influenced the theory and practice of social work from the 1920s to the present. She describes two movements, manifested in Charity Organization Societies (COS) and settlement houses, which competed to characterize the direction in which social work was developing. Tice argues that case records were a vital piece of COS’s argument for a kind of professionalization that “created clients, authorities, problems and solutions” and emphasized one-on-one help rather than organizing for social reform (3). In addition, Tice focuses on how white, female, middle-class caseworkers viewed poor women and women of color clients as either “malignant” or “promising.” By using narrative analysis and focusing on the role of both client and worker in narrative creation, Tice provides a framework from which to view current social work service-provision and recordkeeping practices.———Elizabeth K. Barr

Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan, eds. Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xiv + 301 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-521-55249-4 (cl); 0-521-55819-0 (pb).

The purpose of these twelve essays is to focus upon the construction of subjects in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from the perspective of recent gender studies with some references to recent theories concerning colonialism and postcolonial studies. In the introduction, the editors argue that the early modern period was a two-hundred-year transition to the modern era. This transition involved an intense public debate over the terms of gender identity, which included a wide variety of cultural expressions including ritual, theater, literature, broadsides, and law. All of these materials enter into one of the subsequent essays. While the contributing scholars specialize in English literature, the essays focus on the connection between historical events and theoretical speculation, in order to provide a basis for future explorations of the changing gender systems of the early modern period.———Matthew P. Romaniello

Judith E. Tucker. In the House of the Law: Gender and Islamic Law in Ottoman Syria and Palestine. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. xi + 221 pp.; map; glossary. ISBN 0-520-21039-5 (cl).

This study examines the legal construction of gender in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Syria and Palestine. Using the fatwas (legal opinions) of prominent jurists and the records of the Islamic courts in Damascus, Jerusalem, and Nablus, Tucker investigates the evolution of Islamic law in response to social questions regarding the proper roles of men and women. Her analysis of such issues as marriage, divorce, parenting, and sexuality reveals that the essentially patriarchal nature of Islamic law was somewhat tempered by sensitivity to women’s practical concerns. While they generally upheld male privilege in a kin-based society, the muftis and courts sought also to protect female rights and preserve communal harmony. Their efforts reveal surprising creativity and flexibility in the application of Islamic legal principles.———Charlotte Weber

Rev. Fr. Patrick K. Uchendu. Education and the Changing Economic Role of Nigerian Women. Enugu, Nigeria: Fourth Dimension, 1995. Distributed by African Books Collective, Oxford, England. xv + 148 pp. ISBN 978-156-403-2 (pb).

This work chronicles the position of women in traditional cultures before and after the introduction of Islam, during colonial rule, and following independence. In Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo societies, women played key roles in the economic lives of their communities. Uchendu argues that both Islam and the colonial rule of the British stripped women of their economic independence. Following the Aba Women’s Riot of 1929—an expression of women’s desire for economic independence and their anger at the colonial administration—the British government began to review its policies toward women in Nigeria as well as other African colonies. The book concludes by suggesting that Western education helped women reenter the nation’s economic life, although all kinds of inequality still exist.———Pippa Holloway

Amanda Vickery. The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998. xiii + 436 pp.; ill.; map; appendixes. ISBN 0-300-07531-6 (cl).

Analysis of diaries, letters, and accounts of books of over one hundred women from commercial, professional, and gentry families living in Georgian England shows that these women usually possessed “upright strength.” They were silent on subjects of spirituality and sex. While they may have married to maintain or improve their status, they sought prudent, affectionate matches. Death of their children called for studied fortitude to mask their unutterable grief; discussion of this state of affairs provides the author with one of her many points of difference with the work of Lawrence Stone. Managing the household and servants well provided these women both personal satisfaction and public credit. Sociability was governed by the rules of taste and decorum. Propriety ruled, not conformity or rebellion; only rarely did life depend on mutely submitting to masculine will. Male authority was managed and feminine gentility maintained.———June Z. Fullmer

Gerit von Leitner. Wollen wir unsere Hände in Unschuld waschen? Gertrude Woker (1878–1968) Chemikerin und Internationale Frauenliga, 1915–1968. Berlin: Weidler Verlag, 1998. 439 pp.; ill. ISBN 3-89693-125-3 (pb).

Von Leitner presents a biographical portrait of Gertrude Woker, the first woman in a German-speaking country to teach and research chemistry at the university level. After a detailed description of Woker’s youth and her studies in Bern, Switzerland, and Berlin, von Leitner highlights Woker’s research projects at the University of Bern and her activities in the Swiss women’s movement. The author then focuses on Woker’s leading role in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), especially in her public agitation against chemical warfare during the interwar years. Finally, von Leitner sketches the process of Woker’s appointment as a distinguished professor at the University of Bern, her research, and her activities in WILPF after World War II. The reader will discover Woker’s previously unpublished letters and material which reveal new aspects of her life. Von Leitner examines Woker’s life independently rather than weaving her story into the broader historical context.———Jennifer Anne Davy

Josie Washburn. The Underworld Sewer: A Prostitute Reflects on Life in the Trade, 1871–1909. Ed. Sharon Wood. 1909; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. xvii + 342 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8032-9797-1 (pb).

The semi-autobiographical work of Josie Washburn, a turn-of-the-century prostitute and madam in Omaha and Lincoln, Nebraska, is both a reflection on and scathing critique of prostitution and the social, economic, and political system that upheld it, “written,” as editor Sharon Wood describes it, “in the sure and angry voice of experience” (v). Originally published in 1909, Washburn’s description of the “underworld sewer”—an apt image for a place in which one would not want to live but without which one could not survive—vividly points to the corruption and hypocrisy of almost entirely male city officials, police officers, and landlords who denounced prostitution as evil while reaping the financial and political benefits of its existence. Unlike many contemporary social purity tracts, Washburn’s words do not serve an evangelical aim. Rather, her polemic was (and arguably still is) aimed at those who maintain the system through their apathy and ignorance, as well as their reactionary condemnation of the female “victims” (her words) of both male lust and economic deprivation.———Heather Lee Miller

Ruthe Winegarten. Black Texas Women: A Sourcebook, Documents, Biographies, Timeline. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. xiii + 339 pp. ISBN 0-292-79092-9 (cl); 0-292-79100-3 (pb).

Designed as a companion volume to Winegarten’s Black Texas Women: 150 Years of Trial and Triumph (1995), this collection contains over 250 documents, 50 biographical sketches, and a lengthy timeline of Texas women’s history. The work is divided into sections on free women of color; slavery; Reconstruction and beyond; education; the arts; churches, clubs, and community building; earning a living; and politics and protest. Much of the material, covering such topics as the role of laundering clothes as an economic base for African-American women and the relationship of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to the shift of black women from domestic labor to the fields, suggests interesting themes for future research.———Caryn E. Neumann